Posts Tagged 'beta'

There have been several beta releases of main applications in the last few weeks. One of them is the long awaited public release of VirtualBox 5 for OS/2. The work on the project started again some month ago and the progress so far, so good. The project is run by bitwise works and the founding is done by XEU.com.
Another surprise is the beta 3 release of XWorkplace 1.0.11 made by Rich Walsh. The work on XWP is sponsored by OS/2 Voice.The next beta release is the release candidate 3 of Lucide, a plugin based document and image viewer.

The long awaited Firefox ESR 38 release (38.2.1) is now available after the previous alpha builds in 2015. It took some more time to work on the new fontconfig support and the pango/cairo display engine. The font support and rendering has changed compared to previous versions and thus it requires additional config files and runtime dlls. A newer Cairo version is required for pango, this was ported and is working but printing is currently broken because of this change.
The update to ESR 38.6.1 is already on the way, Mozilla’s next planed update will be ESR 38.7.0.

Firefox 38.2.1 ESR beta for OS/2

Changes in this release:

Switch to original fontconfig for much better font substitution.

Switch from GPI to Pango for better text layout and rendering. This obsoletes ‘gfx.os2.font.*’ properties and also brings long-awaited support for @font-face (loadable Web fonts).

Temporarily disable native print driver support which is currently broken.

Some days ago Serenity/Mensys released a new DemoCD V2.2 Beta 5 of eComstation (an OEM Version of OS/2) with refreshed base drivers. You can grab the iso after registering your mail address from the DemoCD page.

Nearly 2 months after the last post about the Firefox port for OS/2 the team now published their first public beta version of Firefox 17.0.5 ESR. Compared to the previous 10.x ESR branch this version has speed improvements in loading pages, it will also play webm video like the previous version. The preview version has of course several issues: printing doesn’t work, input fields nearly always crashes the browser among other random crashes. The developer will be happy about user feedback, the download and all other information about the beta can be found on the Firefox development page.